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SA boxers can still qualify for Tokyo Olympics

Boxing
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The door is open for South African boxers to qualify for and take part in this year’s Tokyo Olympics Games in July. This follows the intervention of the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (SASCOC) to try and resolve the impasse involving the South African National Boxing Organisation (SANABO).

SASCOC met in Johannesburg last week to appoint an interim committee that will run the affairs of SANABO until elections of the body are held in June.

The entire executive of SANABO resigned en masse last week following allegations of poor governance and its failure to send the national team to the African Olympic qualifying tournament in Senegal last month.

SANABO is the body running the affairs of amateur boxing in the country. SASCOC has been working with SANABO for just over a year‚ to try and bring the warring factions together.

“We were just facilitating we don’t want to interfere, we want them to function on their own so the gathering elected and interim committee that will now try and take SANABO forward to have elections I believe, I believe the next elections will be around June whereby a more permanent structure elected by the membership and through due process will then take charge of SANABO,” says Ravi Govender who is the acting Chief Executive.

Amateur boxers were unable to travel to Dakar due to lack of funding.

“For a while now SANABO have been experiencing certain administrative problems the department of sports and recreation actually declared them as not being complied in terms of their financial reporting, and when we came to realise that the boxers are not going to make it to Dakar because of funding that’s when we became involved as the mother body,” says Govender.

Boxing South Africa is very concerned about the state of amateur boxing in the country, due to the continued infighting among the leadership of SANABO.

“We did not have boxers at Rio, we can’t have that repeating itself reputationally, it’s going to affect us as professional boxing and that is why we will go beyond the call of duty to ensure that we reinforce SANABO and SASCOC’s efforts to ensure that there is a team that is selected, a team that is prepared, and the team that is delivered at Tokyo,” says Tsholofelo Lejaka who is South African Boxing Chief executive.

Failure to qualify through the African continent means the only option available for the boxers is to follow the difficult route of trying to qualify through Europe.

“What worries us the most is the fact that we’ve had an opportunity in Dakar where we could have sent our boxers to compete and qualify most surely for the Olympics in Tokyo that did not happen, we are being told it is not a lost opportunity because there will be another opportunity in France which unfortunately might be a bit more competitive,” says Lejaka.

Masibulele “The Hawk” Makepula and Phillip “The Time Bomb” Ndou, are two South African boxers who launched their successful international careers at the Olympic Games.

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